Caffeine Pills

© William Heidbreder 2013, All Rights Reserved

I just, without thinking, took three 200 mg. caffeine pills, which I take in the mornings when I am out of ground coffee, instead of my sleeping pill, which I take every night, also without thinking (or take in the early morning, like today at 6 AM when I finally finished yesterday’s work . . . you guessed it, I’m a freelancer, who in return for getting to set his own schedule gets the pleasure of being able to exercise punishing discipline over himself rather than through the mediation of a boss, which is so much easier to dispose of in angry rejection, whereas everyone knows that unlike your boss you have to actually live with yourself and with the things you do to yourself because there is no demanding and sometimes cruel authority there to make it easier by doing it to you).  Yes, I tried putting my fingers down my throat in order to vomit up the pills in a moment of dreaded unpleasantness that would be well worth the cost.  No luck.  Maybe I didn’t try enough.  Maybe I lack courage, or even patience.  Anyway, I quickly gave up.  Should I try again?  Reader and friend (yes, “friend”: I originally performed the vain and self-gratifying act of dumping this essay onto Facebook where I have discovered that I have many “friends” whom I have never met and probably never will, whose names I barely recognize, and who are largely uninterested even in what their more genial friends who just write short, friendly, inviting posts about their dog or what they ate for breakfast, have to say, let alone in my reflections on cinema, politics, American culture, and religion), reader and friend or “friend” (I am certain that children with imaginary friends are the prototype for Facebook writers and maybe for all of us), I really want you to tell me if you know: is there a sure way to get those pills out of my stomach, which have now been there for a good hour while I wrote and rewrote this petty complaint the original version of which was lost forever when my computer crashed yet again, deepening my inconsolable despair?  But no matter.  At least, as these no doubt pointless ruminations of mine prove, I don’t give up on writing, even if it’s Facebook posts that no one, or almost no one, ever reads.  And some of them are well-written, damn it, they truly are!  Clearly God has abandoned me.  But my will to write, if not my talent, I have no grand pretenses, abandons me not.  I suppose that this morning I will either take a short nap as a result of the sleeping pill which of course I did also take, even if in futility, and then go about a day of necessarily attenuated and cruelly damaged intellectual, emotional, and spiritual beauty and goodness, or else I will simply not sleep at all and sooner or later, during what is usually for me a very long morning (if not mourning) period of warming up for real work by posting on Facebook and doing other equally pointless and deeply gratifying things that freelancers and graduate students have the leisure to do when they forget their real obligations as they do so much of the time, will begin my day of work as a writer of uncertain literary and moral value, and freelance editor, of certain value to at least a few people, as judged by the fact that they pay me to read what are occasionally their profound and fascinating insights about Argentine literature or German social theory, to which I respond with some relevant insight when I can, as if pretending to be the professor I for so long wanted to be so who, suitably crowned with a PhD, could, after perhaps ten years of writing beautifully crafted essays that essentially no one reads or ever will read, of reading mostly bad undergraduate papers at minimum wage, and of coming up with brilliant ideas that my faculty advisor can use to promote his career), and more often reading and correcting the grammar and word choices in their meaningless garbage that to their great fortune will be read by not one by actually two people: the professor and myself.  Ah hah!  That’s what I need and don’t have: I must of course pay my readers, and then I will be a truly successful writer because at least I will get read.  I have found that after a sleepless night I can usually do my editing work (because though I find it engaging and often challenging in certain ways, I also find it easy) and can often even write intelligently, though not about anything that requires really deep concentration.  I certainly won’t get any work done on that essay on aesthetics today.  But I will, and isn’t this revelation the ultimate in kitsch, seize the day, just as Robin Williams tells his prep school students in Latin that they must in that inspiring Peter Weir film in which a boy kills himself (naturally) because his father can’t tolerate the idea that he would waste his talent as a future doctor or lawyer or stockbroker by playing the fool in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  I will be productive.  There must be a triumph of the will.  That’s what America is all about after all: where there is a will there is a way.  Brush your teeth, say your prayers, and follow the power of positive thinking.  “Accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative; latch on to the affirmative; don’t mess with mister in-between.”  Just one question, reader and friend, yes, you, the only person who has read this, I had no illusions there would be any others (in your singularity as my only audience you are in a way the mirror of my own solus ipse status: this is how writer and reader are alike): should I try to vomit up those caffeine pills and if so do you know how I can do it?  Is there a drug that will do it for me?  How long can I afford to wait before taking that drug?  See, there’s a practical and technical solution for everything.  Spiritual problems, at least in America, can always be solved with a hammer and a nail.  Or with the proper tool of a different type if they are really perverted spiritual problems as mine no doubt are, and maybe I should thank God for that since perversity is the key and the certain path to creativity, everyone knows that, and will say a prayer of thanks to Him if He exists.  I at least thank God for social media like the one I have been using to pretend to talk while merely thinking: they not only mediate the social and deliver friends to me just as surely and reliably as the priest delivers Christ’s body in that little piece of bread, they also give me an opportunity to write something no one will read but that at least has a virtual, theoretical, or possible audience, and which might even help me rehearse for a more populated act of vanity.  Like the secret Tony Leung in In the Mood for Love (this secret being of course the fact that he loves Maggie Cheung) whispers into a hole in a tree, covering the hole up afterwards as a magical precaution to guard the secret he lacked the courage to tell the one other person it concerned (and probably also the only person to whom it would have mattered).  Or like a prayer, which of course can be the deepest and purest and fullest expression of one’s heart and mind, and which might go on for many pages, but which of course no one hears, as it is like The Letter Never Sent.  Or rather like a message that must be sent but that cannot be received.  Am I really talking to you?, you may wonder.  Yes, and I must be, because I’m the only one here.